Pastor Richard Wurmbrand
Cleric driven by missionary zeal despite years of persecution in communist Romania
Stephen Bates
Thu 15 Mar 2001 20.54 EST
Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, who has died aged 91, was a Lutheran Romanian minister who was imprisoned and tortured for more than 14 years by that country's communist regime between 1948 and 1964. After being ransomed by a group of Norwegian Christians, who paid the Romanian government $10,000, he founded the Christian Mission to the Communist World, now a charity called Release International, which supports those persecuted for their faith.
Wurmbrand and his wife Sabina (Obituary, August 31 2000) were both Jewish-born, but converted to Christianity in 1936, apparently after meeting an uneducated German carpenter who gave them a Bible and urged them to read one of the gospels.
The couple, many of whose relatives perished in the Holocaust, subsequently worked for the Anglican mission to the Jews in Bucharest and, following the communist takeover in 1945, set up an underground church for Romanians and Soviet troops from the army of occupation.
Once memorably described in the Times as "an enormous Romanian", Wurmbrand was first arrested in 1948, released in 1956 and then imprisoned again between 1959 and 1964. He spent nearly three years in solitary confinement in an underground cell, and was repeatedly tortured, brain-washed and forced to watch the humiliation of other Christian prisoners. Sabina was also imprisoned and subjected to three years' slave labour.
In 1966, he gave evidence to a US senate internal security subcommittee, at one point stripping to the waist to reveal 18 deep torture wounds. "If I showed you my body, I wonder if you could bear to look at it," he told journalists.
Unsurprisingly, his experiences made him virulently anti-communist. He called the philosophy the greatest crime in humanity, and launched fierce attacks on the Soviet and Chinese regimes and organisations he perceived to be soft on them - such as the World Council of Churches. He claimed that he had once been offered the chance to become a bishop by his captors, so long as he would promise to influence the council in Romania's favour.
His efforts at resistance were not always appreciated. The Hungarian doctor and lay preacher Dr Mihaly Tapolyai claimed in 1967 that Wurmbrand had done little to help religious freedom, telling him: "Your doctrines will strengthen the conviction of communist leaders that Christianity is the ancient enemy of the people." Such attacks, though, came at the height of the cold war, long before the peoples of eastern Europe took their chance to show what they really thought of their regimes.
In fairness, Wurmbrand was not entirely rigid in his views, speaking out, for example, against the treatment of Indonesian communists rounded up in the 1960s by their country's government.
In the west, the Wurmbrands' mission, founded in 1965, smuggled Bibles, supported underground pastors and offered financial aid to the relatives of those imprisoned or killed for their religious beliefs. The pastor was the author of two books about his experiences: Tortured For Christ and In God's Underground, both of which have become bestsellers, translated into more than 50 languages.
Michael Bourdeaux writes: In December 1964, the Rev Stuart Harris, head of the European Christian Mission, held a clandestine meeting with a tall, gaunt figure in a Bucharest park. It was an encounter which would change the western Christian perception of communism for ever. Accepting a ransom of $10,000 was one of the worst financial temptations to which a communist regime ever succumbed. A thousand times the price could not have compensated for the explosion which Wurmbrand's arrival in the west ignited.
The prevalent myth at the time was that the lot of Christians under communist regimes had improved. With a passion that sometimes verged on hysteria, Wurmbrand set out to disprove this; his own body bore the marks of recent torture, and there were millions of others like him. If he sometimes exaggerated the statistics, his essential claim - that persecution was continuing - was correct.
By that time, communist propaganda was exerting a hold on the international Christian agenda through the World Council of Churches and other agencies. Wurmbrand's message, delivered with some of the most powerful oratory the postwar world had seen, awoke the conscience of millions.
He confronted Christian leaders round the world, pouring open scorn on the diplomatic niceties which they claimed should govern any dialogue with the communist authorities or church representatives from eastern Europe.
Wurmbrand's message was a factor in the eventual collapse of the Ceausescu regime in Romania and, in the 1990s, he and his wife appeared on Romanian television and were able to visit the very prison where he had been held, to find there a repository of his books.
Richard Heinrich Wurmbrand, clergyman, born March 24 1909; died February 17 2001